Paladin Drones (UC Berkeley)

We live in an era of technological opportunity, where information sharing and exchange is at the forefront of technological innovation, and the pace at which it can be distributed is aggressively evolving. But this technology hasn’t been utilized to solve widespread public safety problems, like household fires, despite having simple applications to it. In Berkeley and similar cities, firefighter response time is a brisk 3-7 minutes, but unknown traffic and fire scene conditions can add up to 5 minutes before fire fighting begins. Paladin Drones, a Berkeley-based drone startup, aims to eliminate this uncertainty and further decrease response times. Paladin’s drones autonomously rush to a fire scene well before first-responders, analyze hotspots and traffic conditions using a thermal camera, and relay the stream to units through a webapp. With access to this stream on their firetruck laptops while en route, firefighters can start firefighting immediately upon arrival, dramatically decreasing response times.